No One Loves a Policeman (26 page)

What he did not foresee was that he would spend most of the night in a crowded common cell in a Santos Lugares police station, where ten dirty old men caught in acts of sodomy or pedophilia had been taken after a police raid. All the details were being typed out by a clerk who barely raised his eyes from the prehistoric typewriter to inform us that the prisoners would stay where they were until the magistrate assigned to the case had taken all their statements.

After we had hung about for two hours, and in recognition of the fact that Ayala was a serving policeman, the inspector who had just come on duty carrying a box of pastries under his arm gave us permission to see Burgos.

“I should have stayed in Bahía Blanca,” the doctor wailed as soon as he saw us.

He was slumped in a corner of the cell in which the ten geriatric cases struggled for air, while at least a dozen flustered young virgins crowded together like puppies on a row of teats.

“Ayala was going to leave this morning, with or without you,” I said.

“Like rats abandoning a sinking ship,” Burgos grunted, avoiding the inspector's dull glare.

“Where's the professor?” Ayala wanted to know.

“They took him straight home. They herded the rest of us into their van like cattle, but they found him a taxi. All he had to do was promise to call the magistrate, who is a friend of his.”

While the country was collapsing around our ears, and the roly-poly doctor was licking his wounds in the crammed Santos Lugares jail, the magistrate who was supposed to be taking their statements was too busy on much more important business to come to Santos Lugares. It was the inspector himself who told me this, as he offered me his last croissant and a few sips of sugary
mate
.

“An officer has gone to try to persuade the pain-in-the-ass neighbor to withdraw his complaint. I don't want this garbage in here all day. Who's going to feed them? The courts? And anyway, the complaint is about noise, not about prostitution or the white slave trade … A thank you wouldn't go amiss …”

His last words referred to the way I grimaced as I handed him back the
mate
gourd. “Thank you,” I said through clenched teeth. “Who's the magistrate in charge of the case?”

He looked at me, uncertain whether to tell me.

“That's confidential, part of the proceedings, blah, blah, blah … But I've heard you were thrown out of the National Shame, so I'll tell you. His name is Patricio Quesada.”

I jotted the name and telephone number on the corner of a newspaper, then tore it off. The front page was filled with photographs of the previous evening's demonstration in Plaza de Mayo.

“In any case, as soon as my man gets back and confirms the neighbor has withdrawn his complaint, I'm letting the lot of them go. I want them out of here by midday. I've got no funds, and I'm not sending any of my men out to beg food for this bunch of old perverts and underage whores.”

I decided to keep the magistrate's details anyway. Call it instinct or a hunch, faith in the capricious ways of fate, or the sense of smell of a battered old hound who despite wind and rain picks up the sulfurous odor of his own urine and finds his way home intact.

The officer came back soon afterward, and by 8:00 in the morning all those rounded up in the raid were thrown out on to the pavement. Ayala and I waited for Burgos, who finally appeared, eyes lowered. He hailed a taxi, and we set off with him in search of his sky-blue V.W., which he had parked outside the brothel.

“There is a God,” Burgos said triumphantly as he clambered behind the wheel of his exotic vehicle. “That magistrate friend of the professor is one of the people who ordered the raid on Villa El Polaco. He told me
as we were being carted off. That should give you something to chew on, Martelli. Allah is great, but Buenos Aires is greater still: it's a huge bucket full of crooks and traffickers. That's why they needed three magistrates from different jurisdictions to authorize the police to go in shooting.”

“And what did they find?” Ayala wanted to know. “I had to go to the Santiago Cuneo on a hospital visit with that horny brute Rodríguez to uncover the weapons.”

Ayala was in a bad mood again, and with reason. Rodríguez had been devoured by a policewoman who was turned on by the pickled organs in the police museum. The case he had been pursuing in a city he hated was slipping through his fingers, and nobody seemed to give a damn about a cache of weapons stockpiled in a teaching hospital.

“Do as you see fit, Martelli,” Burgos said. “There is a God. It's up to you whether you believe in him or not. I'm heading back down south.”

“Me too,” Ayala said.

“There's nothing more I can do here,” the doctor concluded. All he had done, in fact, in Buenos Aires was to talk to two other medical experts, probably as roly-poly as himself, and spend his nights in bars or brothels. And still he was complaining.

Not long afterward, once they had taken a shower and bundled up the few clothes they had brought with them, Inspector Ayala and Dr. Burgos left for Bahía Blanca. They gave me a final message for Rodríguez.

“If he calls or turns up here, tell him either to come back home and place himself under arrest, or to clear out of Argentina altogether. If I get my hands on him, he's done for,” Ayala said, genuinely distressed at his subordinate's desertion.

With that, we said goodbye. I needed to be alone. I might not have learned much from the three Patagonian musketeers, but even though we had been stumbling around like three blind men in a minefield the experience had alerted my antennae. I could feel a chill breeze blowing from somewhere, even though in those torrid summer days all Argentina seemed to be gasping for breath, and one or two ancient cadavers were beginning to stink.

Soon after my guests had left, I called Patricio Quesada. When I asked to speak to the master of the house, the maid who answered the telephone went silent. I heard her put down the receiver, then the sound of footsteps coming and going. Finally, a young woman's voice told me this was no time to be making declarations to the press. I was not a journalist, I tried to explain, but she slammed down the receiver. When I called back, the line was busy.

After trying in vain to reach Wolf, I lit a cigarette and switched on the radio.

It was 10:15. Half an hour earlier, at 9:45, the front wheel had come off a car speeding along Avenida General Paz. The car had literally flown over the central barrier and crashed head-on into a bus. The accident had blocked the road, causing a long tailback, so the radio announcer was recommending drivers use alternative routes in and out of the capital. Several people had been hurt, and one killed: the driver of the car, a chauffeur who had been ferrying magistrates around for twenty years. I did not have to wait long to learn the name of his passenger, who was now in a coma at the Fernández hospital. It came as no surprise.

Death was shadowing me, either two paces ahead or two behind. It seemed stupid—or suicidal—either to speed up or slow down to meet it.

The shadowing had begun with Edmundo's murder, and I had gone along with it. Reluctantly at first, but Lorena was as persuasive as the Pied Piper of Hamelin. From that moment on, I had simply watched events unfold.

Although Argentina can seem like a no-man's-land, much of it is occupied by warring forces fighting in full view of everyone. This is not 1920s Chicago, with gangsters being shot at the barber's or while they are eating like kings at the most expensive restaurant in town. But there are witnesses who die of viruses that are never identified; people involved in multimillion-dollar scandals who are found hanging from a radio mast the night before they are due to appear in court. There are magistrates who discover at the last minute that they are not competent to judge a case, or suffer strange yet surprisingly frequent accidents such as seeing the front wheel of their car go hurtling across the highway, their car following like a dog chasing a bone.

Patricio Quesada was not in intensive care. He was not even in the Fernández hospital. By the time I got there, the hospital director was explaining to a group of reporters in the main reception area that he had heard about the accident from the press, and had no idea who had released the information, or why. The reporters dispersed, muttering theories: the information had come from the government's official news
agency, so you did not have to be very bright to deduce that the magistrate must have been on to something very big indeed. Since there was no hiding the fact that the car had crashed into the bus, and no chance of concealing the identity of the person involved, somebody in some ministerial or corporate office had placed a call to put the pack of journalist hounds off the scent.

I could not think of any other nearby hi-tech hospital where they might have sent a federal magistrate to try to save his life or let him die in peace far from the prying eyes of the press. It seemed to me too soon to leave the hospital and go and chew on my frustration by myself. Every hour that passed could be putting Isabel at greater risk. Perhaps it was too late to save anyone, in which case my only option was to go back to selling bathroom appliances as if nothing had happened. To forget I had ever been a policeman.

But how could I forget, if I could not forget you? If I kept calling you in the night, just to make sure you were still there? Some day I would say something, and that would be it, because you were just waiting for the moment to slam the last door in my face.

In the end I am not sure if I took on this case nobody asked me to get involved in purely because I was a policeman stripped of his badge and his reason for being. Someone who needed to prove to himself he still existed and could still want you, hoping against hope that one day he could meet you again without you turning away, without you being ashamed of having believed for a moment in this shipwreck survivor. Why should you believe, when the only credentials I could show you were my capacity for violence and the hatred with which I slaughtered the hyenas society protected like hothouse plants. Yes, I shot people who abused the fact that they were human to protest their innocence when they were no more than wolves usurping the dignity of their victims. Why should you believe in someone who would not hesitate to say he would do the same again?

Curiosity sharpens instincts like the scalpel the doctor uses to dig around in the guts of his dead bodies. A policeman's curiosity is unhealthy because the job of defending the rules of co-existence that nobody respects inevitably relies on that keenness which hypocrites call a lack of scruples. Hungry lions or tigers only study the deer's escape routes or the strengths and weaknesses of its herd. Once they have discovered them, they pursue their quarry and do not stop until they have devoured it. The good citizen by contrast simply points, sometimes with his finger, sometimes without a word. And the policeman or soldier of the day kills, tears apart, shares out the spoils.

I do not think I set off to find Isabel because she was my murdered friend's daughter. I think it was out of curiosity, the desire to feel for myself what until then I had only witnessed in other people: joy, tears, anguish and even fear when the tunnels of the labyrinth finally converge in a great cave, when reaching the center of the Earth becomes a question simply of accepting the flames, of screaming as they consume us.

I left the Fernández hospital unconvinced by the director's blunt denial that he knew anything. As I walked past a side entrance I was struck by the large number of policeman obstructing the doorway, by the cars blocking access, and people in everyday clothes standing on the pavement outside, smoking and looking as if they were waiting for a bus, although none came past there. I strode inside without slowing down, flashing my out-of-date but shiny police badge. Because I am a policeman—even though I sell bathroom appliances I have a policeman's face—and nobody stopped me. There were too many of them anyway. They were busy chatting with each other, recognizing faces from various police stations or from headquarters, where they would never have acknowledged each other if they passed in the corridors. Here it was different, they were simply hanging around, they did not
know what all the fuss was about. What possible threat could there be to a magistrate—apart from themselves, it occurred to me.